Chase was named one of the most influential people in Digital Health due to his entrepreneurial success & writing along with luminaries such as Eric Topol, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Vinod Khosla & Elizabeth Holmes. He speaks to & consults with new ventures inside of established companies & high growth startups. Chase is widely published. The book Chase co-authored won the healthcare Book of the Year in in 2014.
Chase has a penchant for making connections between previously disconnected trends and making them understandable and actionable. Chase is in the development stage of a documentary that seeks to make the indecipherable understandable and demonstrate that there is reason for great optimism that a partnership between doc-entrepreneurs and forward-looking clinicians with individuals (fka “patients”) can dramatically out-perform against Quadruple Aim* objectives compared to traditional healthcare orgs.
*The Quadruple Aim is the Triple Aim (improved outcomes & patient experience with lower costs) plus the overlooked 4th Aim — clinician satisfaction critical to improving the current condition where an alarming number of clinicians are overburdened & burnt-out which negatively impacts their lives as well as the individuals they care for.
Chase was the CEO & Co-founder of Avado, which was acquired by and integrated into WebMD and the most widely used healthcare professional site - Medscape.
Before Avado, Chase spent several years outside of healthcare in startups as founder or consulting roles with LiveRez.com, MarketLeader, & WhatCounts. He also played founding & leadership roles in launching two new $1B+ businesses within Microsoft.
Chase is a father, husband & oxygen-fueled mt sport athlete. His 2014 team placed 3rd in their division & 24th overall (out of 500 teams) in America's oldest adventure race (7 legs -- XC ski, downhill ski, run, road bike, canoe, mt. bike & sea kayak) where Dave took on the Nordic ski leg. Dave was a former PAC-10 800 Meter competitor.

The 7 Habits of Highly Patient Centric Providers

Since Dr. Farzad Mostashari’s (the U.S. “healthIT czar”) keynote presentation at the 2012 HIMSS conference, I’ve repeatedly heard that 2013 is the year of patient engagement. Dr. Mostashari unveiled the latest requirements to tap stimulus dollars and virtually all of the new items were around patient engagement. As Lygeia Ricciardi of the ONC recently stated, the ONC is going all-in on patient engagement.

Why the focus on patient engagement? Leonard Kish aptly called patient engagement the blockbuster drug of the century for its profound impact on improving outcomes. Combining patient engagement with other proven approaches such as choice architecture can further improve health outcomes. Evidence is overwhelming that healthcare providers who engage with their patients and caregivers have dramatically better outcomes. Further evidence of patient engagement moving mainstream has come in during the first month of 2013 from government, academia and industry.

Though it’s fallen out of favor, “compliance” is the common phrase still used by some in healthcare. This contrasts with engagement. Here’s how the Center for Advancing Health distinguished the two:

We define engagement as “actions individuals must take to obtain the greatest benefit from the health care services available to them.” This definition focuses on behaviors of individuals relative to their health care that are critical and proximal to health outcomes, rather than the actions of professionals or policies of institutions. Engagement is not synonymous with compliance. Compliance means an individual obeys a directive from a health care provider. Engagement signifies that a person is involved in a process through which he harmonizes robust information and professional advice with his own needs, preferences and abilities in order to prevent, manage and cure disease.

Industry: The leading healtIT trade association, HIMSS, is releasing the seminal book on patient engagement entitled Engage! Transforming Healthcare Through Digital Patient Engagement at their annual conference in March. I had the honor of helping write and edit that book with Jan Oldenburg, Kate Christensen and Brad Tritle. It also includes several case studies highlighting the wide array of successes. There is also a special track at HIMSS13 focused on Patient Experience.

In the opening slide of my talk at the upcoming HIMSS conference I ask the audience which hospital they’d choose if given the choice between one where patients have an 88 percent reduced risk of dying of a cardiac-related cause when enrolled within 90 days of a heart attack, compared to those not in the program, clinical care teams reduced overall mortality by 76 percent and cardiac mortality by 73 percent versus others that didn’t have these outcomes. The choice is obvious. If results from successful patient engagement are this dramatic, it won’t be long before malpractice attorneys are going after providers practicing in the old delivery models. Why would it be different than other proven interventions once evidence broadens? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m not a lawyer so curious the factors that go into defining the Standard of Practice. Comment below if you know.

During the HIMSS talk, a core question I will ask is “When patient engagement becomes the Standard of Care, will HealthIT be ready?” At the moment, most would argue the answer is no. I believe the way we jumpstart the process is by making the business case for patient engagement.

Preparing for the HIMSS speech and writing the book, I leaned heavily on experts in the field to share their experiences. Claiming one’s organization is “patient centric” is like proclaiming you are supportive of motherhood and apple pie, so I will focus on the best indication of patient-centricity — successfully engaging patients. To contrast with what it means to be patient-centric, Vince Kuraitis outlined 5 non-patient-centric approaches.

Note to Forbes readers: Feel free to contact to me via LinkedIn if you’d like a copy of my HIMSS presentation, further details on the ONC ruling or information on the HIMSS book/talk.

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Great article and I am really excited that principles of the Collaborative Care finally get attention. As rightfully stated in the article, the Collaborative Care can only succeed if its driven by the patient-centric focus. By definition, the Collaborative Care will succeed and have the greatest impact if developed by an EMR-independent exchange network. EMR and EHR companies spent a great deal of time and money getting the physicians to adaption of the electronic medical records, disrupting the decades-old paper-based status-quo. However, by their very competitive nature, EMR vendors are also the anchor dragging the Collaborative Care adaption. The reason SureScripts succeeded in converting paper-based drug prescriptions into e-prescriptions was because of their EMR-vendor independence. Another company, Informedika, has pioneered E-Requisitions, which is taking the diagnostic ordering and test results aggregation by storm. Informedika is also successful because of their ability to democratize access to diagnostic information: any diagnostic vendor, any EMR is welcome to collaborate and contribute to the patient-centric record, but never to “own” it. Over the next few years we are going to see more of this shift from the vendor-dependent software to the Collaborative Care networking exchange and its a welcome disruption.

Hi Dave, thanks for calling out my comment! At first I thought I said something wrong, but then I realized being “called-out” is a good thing :) Yes we do see good traction and EMR interest is gaining. There are 7000 registered EMR vendors last time I checked and many vendors are looking for the competitive edge. patient-centric diagnostic data is the next big frontier and Informedika found itself in the crossroads of it. And yet – many more milestones ahead of us: mHealth monitoring devices, health care agencies, hospitals, nursing homes and SNFs require document exchange with ambulatory physicians, care plan oversite review in the outpatient settings… All these need to be in the patient’s electronic “chart”. This should be the goal of the Collaborative Care: capture and identify the type of information, match to the patient and make it available regardless of the originating facility and format of the data. I think Forbes should write something on that subject. Great discussion, Thanks Dave!

Keep me posted. Long term monocultures lose out to more diverse ecosystems but healthcare largely remains in the Wang-like monoculture era vs. the post-Web heterogenous environment. We’re starting to see the first cracks of the silos breaking down but at the same time some health systems are still spending 100′s of millions on monoculture systems. Seemingly unaware that the next field (industry) over diverse systems allow for greater resilience and nimbleness which they’ll desperately need in this time of healthcare turmoil.

It’s reasonably easy to justify spending 100′s of millions when one operates under the assumption that has underpinned healthcare for decades — an assumption of perpetual hyperinflation. However, any healthcare exec NOT betting on entering a deflationary era is delusional. It’s not like you have to look hard to find what healthcare costs are doing to local/state/federal budgets to predict what is coming.

My group is about to migrate over to EMR/EHR as the last group in our organization. Our go live date is 1 May. The process has cost Hundreds of Thousands of dollars. When Medicare announced the mandatory switch, I expected that we would get a universal program that was truly portable. Given the time constraints set by Medicare, everyone here was placed on a time schedule to convert, and we were required to choose a vendor for one of the available programs rather quickly. Any delay would result in the loss of some reimbursement money from medicare. Interestingly most only work on one platform, and most don’t communicate with any other EMR program. If I were to refer a patient within our local network, I can “computer” fax to a specific Doc. They cannot view my notes. If out of network such as another hospital, I will have to print out my computer screen and snail mail or fax the info to that institution. They must then figure out how to incorporate the info into their records. Essentially we have been forced into a Tower of Babel, with vendors pushing their own agenda. Its like VHS vs Beta times 100!. To be truly portable all EMR’s will need a mandate to communicate or provide a bridge between their product and others. Of course this will probably add on another layer of non-reimbursable expense that providers must shoulder from a dwindling level of reimbursement. Collaborative Care will be an exciting and useful means of improving patient care and patient satisfaction. Before it is mandated or becomes a standard of care, we should first have a system that works for all instead of the patchwork system we have been fed. If such a system is in the works please drop me a line.

It seems so critical that the IT decisions regarding EHR be driven by this goal of patient-centric care. So many decisions, systems and processes need to be put in place, but if the goals and the values described in your article are foremost in provider’s mindset, it will lead to decisions that ultimately greatly improve patient care, patient experience, patient outcome and also improve the satisfaction of the provider as well. It does seem like a seismic-shift is occurring and that is very exciting.

Me again, Dave. Jan Oldenburg – from whom you quote generously – sings the praises of integrating all devices with FitBit. It’s not that easy. FitBit is not a Class 1 MDDS according to the FDA. Hence, it cannot comment on blood pressure. Integrating all of your lifestyle measures (i.e., what FitBit is really good at) with your biometric measures that are “Protected Health Information” and regulated by the FDA under its data transmissions regulations results in a tortured consumer experience. Consider the flight attendant who says the same message at the outset of every flight, as regulated by the FAA. Were he/she to make it fun, they’d violate the law. As it is, not very engaging. Does anyone listen? Successful patient engagement has to comply with the Feds and their very unengaging requirements. It’s a conundrum that we, at Healthrageous, are struggling to solve.

It’s interesting you use the FAA requirement on the safety announcement. I have had some good laughs on Southwest Airlines as they give their FAA-regulated announcement. Not easy but engaging doesn’t have to be the opposite of in compliance. SWA got the necessary FAA info across but manages to get people to listen.